Foreigners who took an interest in Japan or
had an influence on the developing culture of modern Japan.

During the Bakumatsu Period and after the Meiji Restoration, many foreigners came to Japan and some of them left us great photo collections. . Photo Collections 写真集 .

- quoteBakumatsu 幕末 bakumatsu, "Late Tokugawa Shogunate",
(literally "end of the military camp [government") refers to the final years of the Edo period when the Tokugawa shogunate ended. Between 1853 and 1867 Japan ended its isolationist foreign policy known as sakoku and changed from a feudal shogunate to the Meiji government.- - - More in the WIKIPEDIA !

William John Alt was born April 4, 1840 in Greenwich, England. At the age of twelve he entered the Merchant Service. Seven years later he joined the Customs Service in China, but left for Nagasaki later the same year after the port was opened to foreign trade. He registered with the British Consulate in Nagasaki January 6, 1860 as a general commission agent.
Like his fellow young merchant-adventurer from Britain, Thomas Glover, William Alt made a considerable fortune in the first decade of the foreign settlement by trading tea, marine products, ships and weapons.source : jeff.jetsets.jp

Richard Henry Brunton
(26 December 1841 – 24 April 1901)
was the so-called "Father of Japanese lighthouses". Brunton was born in Muchalls, Kincardineshire, Scotland. He was employed by the Japanese Government as an o-yatoi gaikokujin to build lighthouses in Japan.

quoteThe Scot who shaped Japan
History has not been generous in crediting the crucial roles played by maverick trader Thomas Blake Glover in casting off feudalism and ushering in the modern age. But as the centenary of this most singular Victorian nears, Michael Gardiner sets the record straight

This coming Friday, Dec. 16, 2011, marks the centenary of the death in his opulent home in the Shiba Park area of Tokyo's central Azabu district of the Scottish-born trader Thomas Blake Glover, who became the first foreigner ever decorated by the Japanese government when he was awarded the Order of the Rising Sun (second class) in 1908.

Despite that remarkable distinction, however, Glover's life and his contribution to the creation of modern Japan and, unknown (but not unsensed) by him, to its ultimate humiliation in 1945, has registered only unevenly and with some unease in today's still often palpably postwar Japan. And that despite it being a tale of such ambiguities, such outright roguery and cutthroat capitalism — and yet of such vision, too — that it beggars belief it has not already had the "Last Samurai" treatment.
..... For all that, and despite the fact that Glover House now gets 2 million visitors a year, including many on school trips, there have been no serious historical dramatizations of Glover's remarkable life and role in history, even though there is a background enthusiasm for his modernizing energy and willingness to negotiate in unfamiliar and dangerous surroundings.

Native American in the Land of the Shogun
Ranald MacDonald and the Opening of Japan
Frederik L. Schodt
Stone Bridge Press

Of no relation to the hamburger chain of a similar-sounding name, he was born in 1824 in the area of what is now Astoria, Oregon.
The son of a Chinook Indian princess and a prominent Scottish official in the Hudson's Bay company in the area, he grew up in the rich natural and cultural environment of the early nineteenth century Pacific Northwest.source : READ MORE

Laurence Oliphant(1829 – 23 December 1888)was a British author, international traveller, diplomatist and mystic.

Oliphant was Lord Elgin's private secretary on his expedition to China and Japan. In 1861 he was appointed first secretary of the British legation in Japan under Minister Plenipotentiary (later Sir) Rutherford Alcock, and might have made a successful diplomatic career if it had not been interrupted, almost at the outset, by a night attack on the legation, in which he nearly lost his life. He permanently lost the full use of his hand. It seems probable that he never properly recovered from this affair.

Satow's publication Sakuron 策論 / サトウ 著
at the Waseda University digital collection an influential book in the mid-1850s during the Edo bakumatsu period leading to the Meiji Restoration. - source : wul.waseda.ac.jp/kotenseki -

A Career of Japan: Baron Raimund von Stillfried
and Early Yokohama Photography

A Career of Japan is the first study of one of the major photographers and personalities of nineteenth-century Japan. Baron Raimund von Stillfried was the most important foreign-born photographer of the Meiji era and one of the first globally active photographers of his generation. He played a key role in the international image of Japan and the adoption of photography within Japanese society itself. Yet, the lack of a thorough study of his activities, travels, and work has been a fundamental gap in both Japanese- and Western-language scholarship. Based on extensive new primary sources and unpublished documents from archives around the world, this book examines von Stillfried’s significance as a cultural mediator between Japan and Central Europe. It highlights the tensions and fierce competition that underpinned the globalising photographic industry at a site of cultural contact and exchange – treaty-port Yokohama. In the process, it raises key questions for Japanese visual culture, Habsburg studies, and cross-cultural histories of photography and globalisation.

“Luke Gartlan’s book is a compelling and enjoyable read, and contributes major new perspectives to the growing field of Meiji photography. It will certainly be the authoritative work on Raimund von Stillfried, but it is also impressive for its contributions to other important areas of Meiji cultural studies, including representations of the emperor, photography of Hokkaido, and world’s fairs.”
Bert Winther-Tamaki (University of California, Irvine) - source : facebook -